Author: Ipstenu (Mika Epstein)

Let’s Talk, Slack
Hi, Slack. You’re the cool product everyone uses to communicate on scale. You’ve introduced a lot of features and aspects that are great. We all like to use you for our non-company work, but I’ve noticed something interesting.

See. You constantly remind us that Slack is for Business. But you don’t seem to have actually spent enough time in corporate land to understand what that means. So, as someone who worked for nearly 15 years (and recently at that) with The Man, and the last five with a smaller company, let me try to explain to you what mistakes you’re making. Oh, and before anyone asks, yes, I’ve pitched all of this in tickets/suggestions to Slack already.

Constant Barrage

Being able to tune alerts on Slack is basically the only way you have to live or die. I can mute channels or group-chats pretty easily, to allow a conversation I need to be aware of, but not right now to carry on around me.

What I can’t do is mute my really, really, really chatty and annoying coworker for an hour so I can get work done.

Oh sure, Slack, it’s passive aggressive to just mute Bob over there who knows I love the Cleveland Problematically Named Baseball Team, and wants to tell me something I will care about in an hour or so. But right now? I have a job. And I want to concentrate without your alerts popping up on my screen and showing that dreaded unread icon. And yes, Slack, I could mute everything, but what about my coworker Jane, the nice one who pings me with an apology because she knows I’m super busy, but she has a critical work problem, and I’m the expert.

Come on, Slack.

Asynchronicity vs Work/Life

While everyone in startup land likes to brag about how they work 80 hours a week, the reality is that most business aren’t actually that stupid. We take vacations. We don’t work weekends. We like to spend time with family, go to a sports game, and not be distracted by the ping of work.

While you have do not disturb settings, Slack, I can only set them for specific hours. So yes, I do set them for 4pm to 7am, because I actually do have an end of day. But I can’t set my work days, I can’t connect Slack to (say) my Google Calendar and have it automatically detect that I’m out of the office. I have to constantly fiddle and tweak things. It’s a mess.

Out of Office Messages

Speaking of this, if I (perchance) happen to forget to mark myself as out of the office, I’m going to get alerts. Fine, that’s on me. But. You introduced custom status messages, which you tout I can use to announce I’m on vacation. Awesome! Now can you make them useful?

See the problem is I put in “Out of the office until Feb 20” pretty recently, and I thought “My coworkers are intelligent, they’ll see this message and know ‘Aha! Mika is out!’ They don’t. And looking at this, I can’t blame them becuase of two things:
1. Readability on MacOS is shit
2. The message doesn’t fully show on iOS
Don’t believe me? Here:

Slack Example from iOS

Slack example from MacOS

Those are hard to read! And why don’t they auto-alert like a DND message does when someone DMs me? “Mika is currently [status message]” — Oh yes, Slack, I know people like to use those for jokes. Want to stop them? Make them auto-reply. Then people would only use them for real.

And by the way…

You’re Ageist

Let me tell you a story.

Once upon a time, not very long ago either, I supported desktop software. I received a phone call from someone in the Big Building, aka where the real bankers worked, and she couldn’t use a product because the screen was unreadable. She couldn’t see the buttons or dropdown. I asked her to give me 30 minutes and I would call her back. Quickly I went through a few steps to size and resize the window, and I couldn’t figure it out. I called her back and asked if I could come to her office.

One 20 minute bus ride later, I’m at the fancy building, going through metal detectors, and I head up to her floor. I apologize for not being in a suit and ask her to please show me her desktop. One glance and I realized the problem was that her desktop itself had been resized. I explained I was going to change the resolution, resize it, and see if that fixed it. I promised I would reset everything.

Nervous, she allowed this. After all, if I closed a specific window, I could cost the company a hefty bit of money. I very cautiously (without minimizing anything), changed the resolution.

“Oh, that’s how it was this morning! My coworker was using my workstation.”

After I head-desked a few times, I checked the app I was responsible for. It was set to take up most of the screen but not all. I resized it, manually, and then restored her preferred resolution. I then wrote down how I did that, how to fix it in the future, and went to give her coworker a stern word that began with “The first rule of using someone else’s workstation is THOU SHALT NOT MESS WITH THEIR SETTINGS.”

A few years later, when I no longer worked on that team, I got a phone call from her again. “My new coworker is having the weird screen problem I had a million years ago. Can we pay you with lunch to fix it again?”

Of course I said yes.

Now re-read those problems I have with you, Slack. Because you’re worse.

To Review

I look at Slack, and I look at the problems I have, and I think “If I wasn’t technically competent, I would be lost.” And I realized “I am technically competent and I still get lost.”

Slack. If you want to make it bigger, if you want big companies and banks to start using you instead of Lotus Notes Messenger, you need to step up your game. Provide business tools, the ones they need to make sure if they’re not available, someone knows who to contact next. Treat people like grown ups with mortgages, not 20-somethings who exist on packing peanuts and internships.

Basically, Slack, you want the grown ups? Grow up.
27 February, 2018
What Is The Measure of a Site?

After you think about where you’re saving your data, internally or externally, you’re going to be faced with the biggest problem known to exist.

What do you do with your data?

Common Data is (Mostly) Obvious

Some data, as I’ve said before, is obvious. That is, you know what you want to do with statistics of visits. The base outset is ‘figure out how many people visit my site.’ Right? Not too hard. But that isn’t all you want to know. You want to know when your site is busiest, what content people read, and maybe you want to know on what device.

You want to know these things because they can help you optimize what you do next. If, for example, your Monday posts are super popular, then you want to make sure you post them at the time the most people are going to visit your site. If you know only 2 people view your site on an iPad, maybe fixing that little annoyance can wait a bit.

Rare Data is A Headache

On the other hand, when you look at statistics for your complex data, like a site with TV shows and characters and actors, you have a completely different problem. What public stats are both relevant and meaningful? And how do you represent them in ways that people can understand?

Like, do you use piecharts?

They can be helpful but only if you don’t have a large number of data slices.

I made a pie chart with 28 slices and it was unreadable. Though that was mostly because everyone had between 1-5% except for one that had 75%.

The Question Is Usage

This is a problematic question because it has no easily defined answer before you start building out your site. We’ve all seen an image of a paved path and then a foot-trail cutting away from it, or winding around an obstacle. People like to joke about how it’s design vs usage. While our goal when making any product is to avoid people walking off the paths, it’s unavoidable. And in the case of public statistics, it’s even harder to predict usage.

A large reason for the problem is what is called a failure of imagination. This is, in part, the fault of the designers. That is, they didn’t predict things properly. Which requires metrics. Which can’t be gathered until people have used the site a little.

You see the problem, I hope.

Start With The Easy

When I built out stats on my site, the ones I wanted people to use, I made sure to start with some easy things. Like those pie charts. Those are just pulled from a custom taxonomy which every character has. They’re simple. They’re easy. And they let people visualize.

After I released it, someone asked “Could we have a chart to show how many actors a character has?”

That was actually not easy, but the point is that by starting with something ‘easy’ I was able to inspire people to ask what they wanted to see.

Don’t Be Afraid to Be Wrong

Remember I mentioned that evil pie chart? You’re going to be wrong. You’re going to assume that the best way to show a specific data point is a pie chart when it really should be a bar chart. If you pick the right chart systems, it shouldn’t be too horrible to switch between them. But sometimes it will be.

Just remember, it’s okay to make mistakes. You can dig up a path and repave it after all.

22 February, 2018
Processing Numbers with WordPress

The very idea of ‘I should make statistics’ or ‘what are the metrics of this’ starts from the same place. We have a desire to understand what a thing is. Statistics, like traffic, and metrics, like speed, can tell us obviously important information about our sites. Faster sites do better. More traffic gets you more… whatever.

But those are the obvious things. There are easy to understand numbers and there are difficult to process numbers. And it all matters where you save the data.

Getting At The Data

When I set about making statistics for LezWatchTV, the biggest problem I faced was determining what I wanted to show. Some things were simple. How many characters died and what percent of all characters was that? How many shows have dead characters?

Since I chose to use WordPress features, like custom taxonomies, for the majority of the aspects of the site, getting those numbers was simple. There were, of course, some that were very difficult to get at, and this is fully of my own design. Sometimes there will be data you want to use that is just harder to get at than others.

This means the question of understanding your numbers begins with understanding where they belong.

Save Data in Smart Places

I say this over and over. Use WordPress’ native features first.

I mean use the taxonomies and the custom post types and the post meta wisely. But. When you’ve got a lot of data that needs to be cross related, consider saving it someplace else. For example, the reason FacetWP is so damn fast is that it doesn’t query WordPress all the time, and instead uses it’s own tables.

Having it’s own table means there’s less overhead as they can make direct SQL calls to pull the data. When you have data spread across three post types, this becomes pretty much an imperative. You just have to script the code to save it properly.

External Data

While FacetWP does save data to it’s own tables, there is another option, and that is external locations. You’re most familiar with this with regards to Google Analytics. Some data makes sense to keep local, but keep in mind what you’re doing and what you’re generating with the data. When it’s just posts, local is perfectly logical. When you get into statistics… Well. Maybe you should export it.

That brings up the next question. What data to you export, and to where.

20 February, 2018
Customizing Which Random Post
Back in December, I posted about how I generated a random post of the day.

After running it for 60 days, I realized I needed to exclude three things:
1. Posts with a specific ‘placeholder’ image
2. Posts with content ‘TBD’
3. Posts with one of two specific meta values
So today we will talk about how awesome WP_Query is.

The Basic Query

As a reminder, your basic query for a random post is this:
```
$args = array( 
	'post_type'      => 'posts',
	'orderby'        => 'rand', 
	'posts_per_page' => '1'
);
$post = new WP_Query( $args );
```
Now, let’s extend it!

Posts With An Image

In this example, I have a very specific default image I use – the mystery person – to indicate the post doesn’t have it’s own image yet. I went and found the image in my media library and took note of the value – 949. Then I added a meta query which said “If the _thumbnail_id does not equal 949.”
```
	'meta_query' => array( 
		array(
			'key'     => '_thumbnail_id',
			'value'   => '949', // Mystery Person
			'compare' => '!=',
		),
```
Seriously. It’s magic.

Posts Without ‘TBD’

We also have a standard convention for when we have a pending data post, but we need it for statistical reasons. Since, as of WP 4.4, you can use negatives in searches, just add this to the basic query:
```
	's'              => '-TBD',
```
This could be useful for your stores, if you wanted to list a product of the day but perhaps not ones with “Coming Soon” in the description. Of course, you should also have some meta flag but you get the idea.

Posts With One of Two Values

Okay. Here’s fun. Let’s say you have a post meta field called example_site_group and there are six choices in it but you only want one and two. Well, for that you need to use an array and a LIKE:
```
	'meta_query' => array( 
		array(
			'key'     => 'example_site_group',
			'value'   => array ( 'baseone', 'basetwo' ),
			'compare' => 'LIKE',
		),
```
This is a little messier, but it certainly does work. Even with serialized data.

Put It All Together

Here’s the real code:
```
// Grab a random post
$args = array( 
	'post_type'      => 'post_type_characters',
	'orderby'        => 'rand', 
	'posts_per_page' => '1',
	's'              => '-TBD',
	'meta_query' => array( 
		array(
			'key'     => '_thumbnail_id',
			'value'   => '949', // Mystery woman
			'compare' => '!=',
		),
		array(
			'key'     => 'lezchars_show_group',
			'value'   => array ( 'regular', 'recurring' ),
			'compare' => 'LIKE',
		),
	)
);
$post = new WP_Query( $args );
```
And voila.
15 February, 2018

Stacked Charts Part 3: The Javascript

Finally!

We have our data in a properly consumable array. It’s formatted the way we need. Now we just need to script the java.

Take a deep breath.

What We Want

What we want is simple. A stacked bar chart that shows the values of all possible permutations. It looks like this:

A stacked chart that shows how many characters per gender orientation there are per country — A stacked chart

That shows how many characters there are per gender orientation, and stacks it for a total count (which is why we needed that count you see).

Send In The Clowns

Since I’m already using Chart.js, I just need to have a function to output the javascript. But. Since I also have to loop through the arrays to get the collective data, I need a bit of PHP:

/*
 * Statistics Display Barcharts
 *
 * Output the list of data usually from functions like self::meta_array
 * It loops through the arrays and outputs data as needed
 *
 * This relies on ChartJS existing
 *
 * @param string $subject The content subject (shows, characters)
 * @param string $data The data - used to generate the URLs
 * @param array $array The array of data
 *
 * @return Content
 */
static function stacked_barcharts( $subject, $data, $array ) {

	// Defaults
	$data       = ( $data == 'nations' )? 'nations' : substr( $data, 8 );
	$title      = ucfirst( substr($subject, 0, -1) ) . ' ' . ucfirst( $data );
	$height     = '550';

	// Define our settings
	switch ( $data ) {
		case 'gender':
		case 'sexuality':
		case 'romantic':
			$title    = 'Character per Nation by ' . ucfirst( $data );
			$datasets = array();
			$terms    = get_terms( 'lez_' . $data, array( 'orderby' => 'count', 'order' => 'DESC', 'hide_empty' => 0 ) );
			if ( ! empty( $terms ) && ! is_wp_error( $terms ) ) {
				foreach ( $terms as $term ) $datasets[] = $term->slug;
			}
			$counter  = 'characters';
			$height   = '400';
			break;
	}
	?>
	<h3><?php echo $title; ?></h3>
	<div id="container" style="width: 100%;">
		<canvas id="barStacked<?php echo ucfirst( $subject ) . ucfirst( $data ); ?>" width="700" height="<?php echo $height; ?>"></canvas>
	</div>

	<script>
	// Defaults
	Chart.defaults.global.responsive = true;
	Chart.defaults.global.legend.display = false;

	// Bar Chart
	var barStacked<?php echo ucfirst( $subject ) . ucfirst( $data ); ?>Data = {
		labels : [
		<?php
			foreach ( $array as $item ) {
				if ( $item[$counter] !== 0 ) {
					$name = esc_html( $item['name'] );
				}
				echo '"'. $name .' ('.$item[$counter].')", ';
			}
		?>
		],
		datasets: [
		<?php
		foreach ( $datasets as $label ) {
			$color = ( $label == 'undefined' )? 'nundefined' : str_replace( ["-", "–","-"], "", $label );
			?>
			{
				borderWidth: 1,
				backgroundColor: window.chartColors.<?php echo $color; ?>,
				label: '<?php echo ucfirst( $label ); ?>',
				stack: 'Stack',
				data : [<?php
					foreach ( $array as $item ) {
						echo $item[ 'dataset' ][ $label ] . ',';
					}
				?>],
			},
			<?php
		}
		?>
		]
	};
	var ctx = document.getElementById("barStacked<?php echo ucfirst( $subject ) . ucfirst( $data ); ?>").getContext("2d");
	var barStacked<?php echo ucfirst( $subject ) . ucfirst( $data ); ?> = new Chart(ctx, {
		type: 'horizontalBar',
		data: barStacked<?php echo ucfirst( $subject ) . ucfirst( $data ); ?>Data,
		options: {
			scales: {
				xAxes: [{ stacked: true }],
				yAxes: [{ stacked: true }]
			},
			tooltips: {
				mode: 'index',
				intersect: false
			},
		}
	});

	</script>
	<?php
}

The Color

You may have noticed a strange variable:

$color = ( $label == 'undefined' )? 'nundefined' : str_replace( ["-", "–","-"], "", $label );

Which was then called in the javascript here:

backgroundColor: window.chartColors.<?php echo $color; ?>,

I have this in a javascript file that is loaded on that page:

// Color Defines
window.chartColors = {
	
	// Gender
	agender: 'rgba(255, 99, 132, 0.6)', // 'red'
	cisgender: 'rgba(75, 192, 192, 0.6)', // 'aqua'
	demigender: 'rgba(255, 205, 86, 0.6)', // 'goldenrod'
	genderfluid: 'rgba(54, 162, 235, 0.6)', // 'light blue'
	genderqueer: 'rgba(255, 159, 64, 0.6)', // 'orange'
	nonbinary: 'rgba(201, 203, 207, 0.6)', // 'grey'
	transman: 'rgba(0, 169, 80, 0.6)', // 'green'
	transwoman: 'rgba(153, 102, 255, 0.6)', // 'purple'

	// Sexuality
	asexual: 'rgba(255, 99, 132, 0.6)', // 'red'
	bisexual: 'rgba(75, 192, 192, 0.6)', // 'aqua'
	heterosexual: 'rgba(255, 205, 86, 0.6)', // 'goldenrod'
	homosexual: 'rgba(54, 162, 235, 0.6)', // 'light blue'
	pansexual: 'rgba(255, 159, 64, 0.6)', // 'orange'
	nundefined: 'rgba(201, 203, 207, 0.6)', // 'grey'
	queer: 'rgba(0, 169, 80, 0.6)', // 'green'
	demisexual: 'rgba(153, 102, 255, 0.6)', // 'purple'
}

The reason it’s ‘undefined’ is that things got weird when I had a variable with a name of undefined.

13 February, 2018

Stacked Charts Part 2: Rebuilding the Array
I’ve talked about this before in category statistics, but in order to get the data from a simple array into a Chart.js consumable one, we have to rebuild the array.

All Arrays are not Equal

In order to save the data in a way I could use and reuse, I had to aim at the lowest common denominator. But also I had to save the arrays at a per show basis, which is not the same as what I was going to need to output.

Instead of just outputting the averages for the show, I needed to combine all this into a ‘by nation’ statistic. That is, I needed to get a list of all shows that were associated with a taxonomy value for that country (easy) and combine all their arrays (not quite easy) and order the data in a way that would make sense (not easy).

So again we start with understanding the array. Here’s a show that happens to air in Argentina:
```
Array
(
    [cisgender]    => 2
    [trans-woman]  => 0
    [trans-man]    => 0
    [non-binary]   => 0
    [gender-fluid] => 0
    [gender-queer] => 0
    [agender]      => 0
)
```
This is the data for one show. Argentina has 2, oddly both with the same stats breakdown by gender identity. What I need to do is loop through both those shows and add the arrays to be this:
```
Array
(
    [cisgender]    => 4
    [trans-woman]  => 0
    [trans-man]    => 0
    [non-binary]   => 0
    [gender-fluid] => 0
    [gender-queer] => 0
    [agender]      => 0
)
```
Get the Base Arrays

Just like before, we make an array of the base data as we have it in the gender, sexuality, and romantic orientations. In this case, we’re adding in a query to change the order to be largest to smallest overall from the taxonomy. While this may not be true for all nations in the future, it is today:
```
$taxonomy = get_terms( 'lez_nations' );
foreach ( $taxonomy as $the_tax ) {
}
```
I need to pause here. Everything from here out goes in that foreach. We’re going to be looping for each nation in the list of nations. Now… I re-use this code for multiple taxonomies, so lez_nations is actually lez_' . $data and it dynamically changes based on how I call this function.

On we go!
```
	$characters = 0;
	$shows      = 0;
	
	// Create a massive array of all the character terms we care about...
	$valid_char_data = array( 
		'gender'    => 'lez_gender',
		'sexuality' => 'lez_sexuality',
		'romantic'  => 'lez_romantic',
	);

	if ( isset( $subdata ) && !empty( $subdata ) ) {
		$char_data = array();
		$terms     = get_terms( $valid_char_data[ $subdata ], array( 'orderby' => 'count', 'order' => 'DESC' ) );

		if ( ! empty( $terms ) && ! is_wp_error( $terms ) ) {
			foreach ( $terms as $term ) {
				$char_data[ $term->slug ] = 0;
			}
		}
	}
```
Now that we have those base arrays, again set to zero,

By the way, $subdata and $data are parameters sent to the function that runs this. $subdata is for the taxonomy we’re calculating (sexuality etc) and $data is for the overall taxonomy (Nations or perhaps Stations or genres – we use a lot of those).

This gets us started.

Queery the Posts

Next we need a WP_Query of all the posts in the taxonomy.
```
	$count = wp_count_posts( 'post_type_shows' )->publish;
	$queery = new WP_Query ( array(
		'post_type'              => 'post_type_shows',
		'posts_per_page'         => $count,
		'post_status'            => array( 'publish' ),
		'tax_query'              => array( array(
			'taxonomy' => 'lez_' . $data,
			'field'    => 'slug',
			'terms'    => $the_tax->slug,
			'operator' => '=',
		),),
	) );
	wp_reset_query();
```
Remember, this is still within that foreach above. And once we have the posts, let’s query all the shows:
```
	if ( $queery->have_posts() ) {
		foreach( $queery->posts as $show ) {

			$shows++;
			// Get all the crazy arrays
			$gender = get_post_meta( $show->ID, 'lezshows_char_gender' );
			if ( isset( $subdata ) ) { 
				$dataset = get_post_meta( $show->ID, 'lezshows_char_' . $subdata );
			}

			// Add the character counts
			foreach( array_shift( $gender ) as $this_gender => $count ) {
				$characters += $count;
			}

			if ( !empty( $dataset ) ) {
				foreach( array_shift( $dataset ) as $this_data => $count ) {
					$char_data[ $this_data ] += $count;
				}
			}

		}
	}
```
The weird section you see, // Add the character counts is there because every character has a gender, but not everyone has a sexuality or romantic orientation. Because of that, I decided it was safest to use that as my baseline count.

The second section that checks if ( !empty( $dataset ) ) {...} is what adds things up for the array.

Speaking of…

Output the New Array

Once I have those counts, I generate different arrays depending on what I’m outputting. The basic barchart is different from a percentage, which is different from the stacked bar.
```
	// Determine what kind of array we need to show...
	switch( $format ) {
		case 'barchart':
			$array[] = array (
				'name'  => $the_tax->name,
				'count' => $shows,
			);
			break;
		case 'percentage':
			$array = self::taxonomy( 'post_type_shows', 'lez_' . $data );
			break;
		case 'count':
			$array = count( $taxonomy );
			break;
		case 'stackedbar':
			$array[$the_tax->slug] = array(
				'name'       => $the_tax->name,
				'count'      => $shows,
				'characters' => $characters,
				'dataset'    => $char_data,
			);
	}
```
And all of this is so I could get that silly stacked bar, which will have the count of total characters, shows, and the data.

Whew.
8 February, 2018

Author: Ipstenu (Mika Epstein)

Let’s Talk, Slack

Constant Barrage

Asynchronicity vs Work/Life

Out of Office Messages

You’re Ageist

To Review

What Is The Measure of a Site?

Common Data is (Mostly) Obvious

Rare Data is A Headache

The Question Is Usage

Start With The Easy

Don’t Be Afraid to Be Wrong

Processing Numbers with WordPress

Getting At The Data

Save Data in Smart Places

External Data

Customizing Which Random Post

The Basic Query

Posts With An Image

Posts Without ‘TBD’

Posts With One of Two Values

Put It All Together

Stacked Charts Part 3: The Javascript

What We Want

Send In The Clowns

The Color

Stacked Charts Part 2: Rebuilding the Array

All Arrays are not Equal

Get the Base Arrays

Queery the Posts

Output the New Array